Howard Koch (screenwriter)

Howard Koch (December 2, 1902 - August 17, 1995) was an American screenwriter who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.

Born in New York City, New York, his first accepted screenplay was made into a 1940 film. Koch was blacklisted because of his involvement with pro-Soviet propaganda films such as Mission to Moscow (1943), which he wrote the screenplay for. However, because he was blacklisted, he moved to the United Kingdom with other blacklisted writers where he wrote under the pseudonym "Peter Howard." His work includes the Orson Welles radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938), Shining Victory (1941), collaboration on the screenplay of Casablanca (1942), for which he received an Academy Award, and Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Koch's play Invasion from Mars, about the effect of the radio drama The War of the Worlds on some of its listeners, was made into a 1975 TV movie, The Night That Panicked America.

Howard Koch died in 1995 in Woodstock, New York. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School.

Bibliography

Play:

• "Invasion from Mars", (pl) CBS Oct 1938

Book:

• "Invasion from Mars", ed. Orson Welles, Dell 1949

Short story:

• "Invasion from Inner Space", (nv) in Star Science Fiction Stories #6, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine 1959

Anthologies:

• Invaders of Earth, ed. Groff Conklin, Vanguard 1952, Pocket 1955, Tempo 1962

• The Treasury of Science Fiction Classics, ed. Harold W. Kuebler, Hanover House 1954

• The Armchair Science Reader, ed. Isabel S. Gordon & Sophie Sorkin, Simon & Schuster 1959

• Enemies in Space, ed. Groff Conklin, Digit 1962

• Contact, ed. Noel Keyes, Paperback Library 1963

• Speculations, ed. Thomas E. Sanders, Glencoe Press 1973

• Bug-Eyed Monsters, ed. Anthony Cheetham, Panther 1974

It is likely that all of the above publications were for the same story or play in one form or another.

External links

• Howard Koch at IMDb